Tag: breakfast

When he’s not gallivanting around the world saving civilization from the likes of SMERSH and SPECTRE, James Bond likes to relax at home. The day begins with the same routine: breakfast, and every breakfast is the same: a boiled egg, two slices of whole wheat toast with marmalade jam and coffee. Ian Fleming describes this in great detail in From Russia With Love. The brown egg is boiled for three-and-a-third minutes before being placed in Bond’s favourite eggcup:

“It was a very fresh, speckled brown egg from French Marans hens owned by some friend of May in the country. (Bond disliked white eggs and, faddish as he was in many small things, it amused him to maintain that there was such a thing as the perfect boiled egg.)”

Marans hens, for those who don’t know poultry, originated in the département of Charente-Maritime, in the Poitou-Charentes region of western France. In Fleming’s short story, 007 in New York, Bond’s passion for Maran eggs is such that he travels the length and breadth of the city in an attempt to track some down only to be told by a grocery store clerk, “We don’t stock ’em, mister. People think they’re dirty.”

Bond had better luck with eggs in the Big Apple in Live and Let Die. On the run from the evil Mr. Big, 007 “hides” at the St. Regis Hotel, where he orders a substantial breakfast: pineapple juice, cornflakes, eggs and bacon, toast with marmalade and a double espresso. Although he is in mortal danger, Bond does not want to face death over sunny-side up eggs. He insists instead on œufs cocotte à la Provençale.

Speaking of eggs and New York City, Paul Simon says he was eating in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Manhattan and there was a chicken and egg dish on the menu called “Mother and Child Reunion.” Simon: “And I said, I gotta use that one.”

“Have you ever seen a man, woman, or child who wasn’t eating an egg or just going to eat an egg or just coming away from eating an egg? I tell you, the good old egg is the foundation of daily life.” — P.G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens

In Irish, the word “Ballymaloe” means “the townland of sweet honey”, from baile (town), lua (sweet) and meal (honey). Ballymaloe is located in Shanagarry, which means “old garden”, and Ballymaloe Cookery School is set in 10 acres of organic gardens, which are surrounded by 100 acres of East Cork farmland. The school is the generous sponsor of the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize, in association with The Moth magazine, and there’s a total of €13,000 in the pot.

The American poet Elizabeth Bishop was an accomplished cook and here she creates food for thought with the repetition of the words crumb and coffee. The coffee turns from a drop to a cup into gallons, while the crumb evolves into a roll, a buttered loaf and finally “my mansion, made for me by a miracle.” It should be noted that she wrote the poem during the Great Depression when she saw the jobless lining up for coffee and bread. They were dependent on the charity and goodwill of the “man on the balcony”, who represents the elites and the bureaucrats, who never hunger or thirst. The miracle Elizabeth Bishop’s masses hope for alludes to the Biblical story in which Jesus fed 5,000 people with only five loaves of bread and two fish.

A Miracle For Breakfast

At six o’clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony
— like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.
It was so cold we hoped that the coffee
would be very hot, seeing that the sun
was not going to warm us; and that the crumb
would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.
At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.

He stood for a minute alone on the balcony
looking over our heads toward the river.
A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,
consisting of one lone cup of coffee
and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,
his head, so to speak, in the clouds — along with the sun.

Was the man crazy? What under the sun
was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!
Each man received one rather hard crumb,
which some flicked scornfully into the river,
and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.
Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.

I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.
A beautiful villa stood in the sun
and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
In front, a baroque white plaster balcony
added by birds, who nest along the river,
— I saw it with one eye close to the crumb–

and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb
my mansion, made for me by a miracle,
through ages, by insects, birds, and the river
working the stone. Every day, in the sun,
at breakfast time I sit on my balcony
with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.
A window across the river caught the sun
as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.

While hiking in the Swiss Alps during the latter part of the 19th century, Dr. Maximilian Bircher-Benner stayed with a family who ate a simple breakfast food called “d’Spys” (Swiss German for “the dish”, in German die Speise). Inspired by the meal, he developed his own variant based on oats, dried fruits, seeds and nuts, mixed with milk or yogurt. Thus was born muesli and it became an essential part of the morning routine for patients in the Bircher-Benner clinic in Zürich, where a diet rich in fruit and vegetables was a core part of the good doctor’s nutritional therapy.

Language note: The word Müesli is an Alemannic form of Mues which means “mash-up.”

Agrarian note: Now that calves are very valuable, they need pampering and their very own calf muesli contains barley, maize, soya, peas, beans and molasses.